In a recent diary, I ran into a kossack who seemed to believe 4 assumptions:
- Employing public employees = a bad/ expensive choice.
- Breaking jobs down into parts and outsourcing some parts leads to efficiencies and cost savings.
- Private company employees do an equal if not better job than public service employees for less.
- We could all be enjoying tax savings from assumptions 1-3 if not for public service employee unions such as the job under examination in this case was a school custodian.
You pool the school's floors with all the other floors cleaned by the company in question and you get economies of scale and save money while minimizing the number of expensive employees that the school department has.
I'm not going to call out this kossack. That would be rude, and it's irrelevant. What is relevant is that even here, we obviously have members who have bought into these assumptions and are filled with, if not anger/ envy, then at least annoyance with public service employees, the amount of tax money they are allegedly getting, and their unions.
Rec List? Thx!:) brb have to feed kid.
During a visit to the NASA space center in 1962, President Kennedy noticed a janitor carrying a broom. He interrupted his tour, walked over to the man and said, "Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?"
The janitor responded, "I’m helping put a man on the moon, Mr. President."
Many, if not most, have heard this story. It used to be a staple tale in management classes when managers were encouraged to clearly communicate the goals of organizations to ALL employees, so everyone could understand how their job fit in with and supported the organizational mission.
I think of this story quite often, because our school custodian is a modern day example of that janitor. So, when a fellow kossack posted the comment above, I stepped into the thread to stand up for a fellow team mate, Joe our School Custodian.
While other kossacks were upset that the discussion was focused on cold, rational metrics, I didn't really mind that. I knew a very good argument could be made based solely on public employees being a VERY good business deal for the American tax payer ... oh, and yes, all the rest of the value added stuff was in there, as well.
Here was basically my response (I added some things and rearranged portions to make it more of a diary) to the kossack who wanted to outsource school cleaning services:
Yes, you do have different opinions in this area, but I'm very comfortable having a discussion about this using the metrics you prefer. I would still like you to answer straight up where you got the idea that:
You pool the school's floors with all the other floors cleaned by the company in question and you get economies of scale and save money while minimizing the number of expensive employees that the school department has.
my emphasis
LOL How much do you think custodians make? In our state, they make between $8.86 and $13.68 (that's the scale for 0 to 30 years experience). That's an average of $11.27 per hour or $23,261 per year.
Adding in benefits, for the loaded salary, you have:
- Pension: Employees have 9.7% deducted from salary as their contribution and the state contributes 13.7%, so that is an additional $3187.50
- Medicare contribution by state = 1.45% = $337.28
- Note: The state does not make any Social Security contribution since none of the public employees in our state are elligible for SS. This was the state's choice, and it is why the pension contribution is higher than other states since it is the only retirement program for state employees. Also note that full retirement requires 27 years of service, the earliest it begins is 60 years of age with a top 67.5% salary replacement rate. The state is required to pay in the pension contribution on an annual basis, so between the employee and state's long term contributions and the magic of compound interest, THIS is the fund that supports public employee pensions.
- Health Insurance benefits: $502.43/ month = $6029.16 (Note: That's for the basic plan with a high deductible. Most of us also pay in to buy a better option. For example, I pay an additional $650 per month for good coverage for my family. Right wing messages frequently decry the "great" insurance and pensions public employees get, but they rarely if ever mention what state employees contribute. Between health insurance and pension contributions, I have 27.5% of my salary deducted. When I worked in private industry, my benefits contributions were below 5% of my salary.)
- Life Insurance: a $20,000 term life policy = $45 per month x 12 = $540 per year
Total Loaded for a custodian is $33,354.94. So, the loaded hourly wage is $16.16
A professional cleaner in our area charges $12.00 per classroom or $27.50/ hour on a time based schedule. Our custodian can process a room in 15 minutes, so the cost of doing a room using a public employee is $4.04.
Even if you assume the custodian is a "head custodian," the pay range only goes up to $9.86 - $14.44 at 30 years of experience. That would make the TOP loaded hourly rate: $19.81 per hour for a 30 year experience Head Custodian. Which is still well under (27% cost savings) the outside contractor rate.
Bottom-line: The public employee is more cost effective.
I think I do understand how people like you think. I used to work in environments that primarily focused on the bottom-line. Trust me, I've done presentations before Jack Welsh, in my past life, and THOSE experiences were just about as cut and dried, bottom-lined focused as you could get.
That's why I've been framing my response in terms of money and time -- without the warm and fuzzy considerations and the intangibles you get from having a custodian who is really part of the educational team. But short term expense is only one factor businesses consider. Three others include:
- Long term costs (Which you have already conceded after understanding that custodians do much more than clean; they are also responsible for maintaining our significant capital investment in our educational physical plants.)
- Direct and in-direct support of organizational goals.
- Quality - Implicit in the assumption that public sector jobs should be privatized is that they can be done cheaper at the same or at a better level of quality.
I would like you to at least think about schools as being really quite different from a business environment. Good schools ARE a community. They are not small widget factories. Good schools are high performing teams that include ALL the staff members, alongwith the students and their families. Our school operates that way, and we have corresponding results on two key organizational metrics: test scores and attendance.
Though our school has the highest Free & Reduced Lunch % (a measure of poverty) in our district [which is very large since we are organized into county-wide districts across the state], our test scores are the highest in the district. Our scores are much higher than national averages, as well, and our 8th graders just blew the top off of the science scores on the Explore Test (that's the first, early ACT test). We improved 2 whole points over the previous year, and a .2 improvement is considered significant.
Why the good test scores? Well, I think we do have a good teaching staff, but a big part of the reason is that we also have the highest attendance rates in the district. You can have the greatest teacher in the world, but if you're not in the class, you still aren't going to learn anything.
And, part of that result is due to our custodian.
For example, the summer before last, he was following the news about H1N1 flu. He took the initiative to write a grant proposal requesting funding from our State Health Department to buy hand sanitizer dispensers for out classrooms. Then, he installed them, so now one of our procedures before going to lunch is to have all our kids hit the dispenser as they go out the door. This kind of thing is above and beyond what is in his job description, but he thinks of himself as being part of the team.
I'll give you another daily type example: As he moves from room-to-room, he just automatically wipes the door handles as he comes in, runs his disinfecting cloth over the pencil sharpener, and similarly wipes the bannisters as he moves from floor to floor. These efforts don't really add any time to his workday.
No one told him to do this. He would not get in trouble if he didn't do it, and his pay is not tied to absentee rates. But, he has internalized low absentee rates as being one of his goals, and his cleaning efforts demonstrate that he's not just checking off tasks -- he is doing everything he can to maintain a healthy environment for us.
Our custodian is a valued part of our team. You get a value-added, higher quality output when you hire well, and then, give that person the opportunity to have a Whole Job and the respect of being considered a valued member of a high performance team. The team's goals are his goals, and he structures his job to help meet those goals.
Which brings up the issue of quality. Our custodian is less expensive than an outside contractor, and due to his buy-in on the organizational goals he has aligned his job tasks to support those goals ... but wouldn't a contractor do just as high a quality job?
I'm going to share a critical incident scenario to address this question.
We actually had experience with having an outside contractor come in to do just the cleaning when our custodian was out on sick leave after surgery. He was gone for a month. It was awful.
The contract workers had no sense of ownership or pride in their work. To be fair to them, they were probably given more work to do than the time actually required to do a complete job. However, the difference was remarkable:
The contractor cleaners swept the aisles but not under the tables -- even though we have our students put the chairs up on the tables at the end of the day to facilitate having the whole floor swept.
Most of us have two trash cans; they only emptied one of them.
They only mopped the floor once; again, they just did the aisles -- not under the tables and not all the way into the corners. It was actually kind of grimmly funny how you could see the path the mop made.
Once a week, our custodian gives our floors, white boards, and table tops a steam cleaning. This removes the residue on the boards keeping them in pristine shape and he steam cleans the table tops to help stop the spread of colds, flu's, and tummy troubles. The contractor didn't clean either the table tops or boards, and I already talked about the floors.
They never cleaned the sinks in our science lab rooms, and didn't clean lab glassware. Normally, if we use glassware, we can just put it in a tub and our custodian runs it through the kitchen dishwasher for us.
The contractors only filled the TP and paper towels in the bathrooms, but did not fill the paper towels in the lab rooms. We had to learn how to do that ourselves.
AND, of course, during this time the regular plant fixes and maintainance either went undone, or we had to hire very expensive outside contractors to unplug toilet pipes, fix door handles, etc.
We ended up adding sweeping floors, taking out our second trash can, cleaning tables (with Lysol instead of steaming), cleaning sinks, filling paper towel dispensers, and hand washing lab glassware to OUR set of tasks. This may not sound like much, but over the course of a week it added up -- I'd estimate that it added about 2-3 hours of extra work for me each week, which meant I had a choice of using planning/ grading time during the day or staying after school to do these tasks.
Yes, we communicated the issues, and we filled out the contractor's Service Request Order paperwork to try to get them to do a better quality job. After doing so, we'd find one copy of the form taped to our door the next day with checks next to the tasks done.
But the work was still not a quality effort. For example, they did clean the tables, but they didn't slide the supply bins or mini-white boards holders to the side to clean the table UNDER them. They just wiped around them! The second trash can was taken out that day, but the next day it wasn't. We learned that emptying the second trash can was not on the list of tasks in their contract, and we'd have to fill out a Service Request Order form everyday, and each time we did so, the contractor added an additional small charge to the school.
Of course, our administration quickly sent out an email asking us to not put in any more Request for Services forms.
So, we all added the cleaning tasks to our teaching responsibilities until our custodian came back. From this experience, the district decided to go back to the cheaper/ better quality process which is to post the job as a time and a half overtime opportunity for other public employee custodians to cover each other when an employee is out.
Again, the numbers: Average loaded, over-time salary for a custodian would be $24.24 with the highest possible cost being $29.71. The average between these two is $26.97 which is .53 an hour less using the public employee on over-time.
Going back to your underlying assumption:
You pool the school's floors with all the other floors cleaned by the company in question and you get economies of scale and save money while minimizing the number of expensive employees that the school department has.
Your assumption isn't true in this case, and I'd be glad to go through this over and over for different jobs, as well. The meme that civil employees are crappy workers who get big salaries and very costly benefits doesn't wash. And I encourage people to get the facts about public employees in their states, as well:
It's pretty easy. Just go to Sunshine Review for data on state employee salaries and benefits.
I want to stress that job design plays an important role in how well a job is done. Yes, some jobs can be broken down into bits and outsourced for a small percentage cost savings, but this is far from being a universally good business idea. Frequently, a whole job design, combined with an appropriate level of autonomy and a High Performing Team approach actually creates intrinsic benefits that are highly motivational.
In fact, this approach can even lead to unusual, unforeseen outcomes -- such as our custodian gets a kick out of trying to find ways to "pay a part of his salary back" each year by looking for efficiencies. Our custodian worked with my STEM [Science Technology Engineering Team] to do an experiment and study to figure out how we could reduce our electrical use. They found that turning out bathroom lights and classroom lights when no one was in them made a significant difference. He showed the kids how to read the meters and worked with them via walkee talkee to perform the Lights Out experiment. Then, our custodian priced motion detection timers for light switches, and together, we did the cost benefits analysis for how long it would take to pay back the investment in the switches. It would pay for itself in a year, but now, he's hunting around (on his own time) to see if there might be an energy efficiency grant for it and he's sent a letter to McConnell to see if there could be a rather tiny earmark made. LOL I had to laugh at that.
And he does that and manages to mop the corners, too. He has his routine processes down pat. He's a master performer at them, so he's both good and fast.
You seem to have really bought into the meme that outside contractors are usually more effective and less costly than public employees. Again, I ask you WHY? Where did the bias FOR outside, for-profit contractors come from? What is it based on?
I'm not saying that ALL custodians are as great as ours is, but the salary argument, at the very least, is true across an entire state of custodians. So, if you want to call this a "strawman," then it's a pretty damn big strawman against nothing supportuing your bias - in terms of your perferred metrics.
I hope this might encourage any similarly questioning kossacks to go to the link I provided and get some facts about the real live people who are the public service employees in your states, because I really am concerned about the louder and louder drumbeats I seem to be hearing -- even here.